Readings today regarding the Prodigal Son and God's grace from Gospel of Luke. I've always liked this story, seeing the Father as God, and the sons as varying versions of us, either being the troublemaker or the individual fighting jealousy when grace and love is given to those who we don't believe deserve it.
I particularly take notice that the father ran and hugged and kissed his son before the son even had the chance to tell his father his repentance. Grace, that which we do not deserve. An amazing concept, and I like reading the story this way, with the father's grace and love coming before his son apologizes. I would think that God's grace would extend to all people, for all time, and would conquer death and not be limited by such an occurrence, and would ultimately "defeat" all human sinfulness/stubbornness to reject God's grace. We can only reject God's grace for so long, as we are finite, whereas God's grace would have to be infinite. To say otherwise treads a line where our power to reject such grace forever means that the power to reject is more powerful than the power of God's grace.
How much emphasis on the fact that the father, presumably, didn't know the son was going to ask forgiveness when he ran out...maybe he assumed as much, but didn't know for sure that his son was apologetic. He was giving grace and love without knowledge of the recipient's remorse. Makes me think again on how these gifts are truly independent of our actions, yet we tend to subconsciously make salvation dependent on our actions - be it how we live, who we worship, where we worship, what we read and call holy, what we call ourselves. All human choices that would supposedly affect our ultimate fate and trump gifts of love and grace.
In the back of my head, I hear "free will, free will" ringing out. I accept free will on various levels, but is our free will more powerful than God's grace? Is our free will diminished in any way if our ultimate fate is determined, not by our actions, but the endless nature of God's grace? I don't like the idea of diminishing free will, but I have trouble accepting a promise that seems to limit the reach of grace, putting something human as more powerful than God. It just doesn't seem to completely add up.
I somehow forgot to add your new blog to my RSS, so I just re-discovered it. Cool to see you actively writing.This post articulates my discovery of the last couple of years. God loves me the same no matter what I do. No matter how hard I pray to him, no matter how poorly I use my time or what screw ups I make, God loves me immensely. There is nothing I can do to diminish his passionate affection for me. It's always there. That fact is easily lost if it's not continually reaffirmed explicitly in every stage of our lives. We begin to think that our faith or our zeal will determine what God puts into our relationship with Him. It doesn't. But, I really do believe that God has given us the freedom to choose him or not choose him. It doesn't affect his love for us, but it is the way he created us, out of love! I think he loves the freedom he gives us. Think of how much a parent would want their child to choose them freely, instead of being fated to. The story of our growing up is one of progressing away from fate and towards freely choosing.Not to ramble. A book on this topic that I want to read is "A Friendship Like No Other" by William Barry.
ReplyDeleteI think a problem lies in the application of "eternal suffering" to the analogy of a parent.The idea is that God loves the free choice that we make. Our choice to be with Him is what love is actually. When we love him, we are choosing him. I think it's coherent to say that he can't force us to love him. If he did, that would not be love that we're exhibiting. It's in the same category as God not being able to make a triangle with 4 sides. He could make something 4-sided but we simply wouldn't call it a triangle.And God gave us these free choices, and continually sustains us and our ability to make those free choices. To me that seems to be more powerful than us..
ReplyDeleteI agree that its coherent to say that He can't force us to love Him, that would run contrary to what our probable working definition of love is. I like the comparison with the 4 sided triangle - a logical impossibility, going back to the definition of omnipotent - God can do all things logically possible (stealing that from Rob Reuter).Thus, as the case usually is with my consistency struggles, the details are in the definitions. So, it is not logically possible for God to love us unconditionally and not "accept" our free choice "rejection" of him. I think that makes some sense.In the end, while this is starting to get more consistent for me, I'm not sure if I can ever get comfortable with the idea that we can eternally reject God's love, as opposed to God's love outlasting our own stubbornness, I suppose. The uneasiness probably comes from the fact that I have always been doubtful of the concept of hell in this theological structure, and I may just be fighting to keep that doubt for no good reason. Who knows, I could probably ramble all day on this topic.But thanks again for the reply...its nice to have feedback to ideas such as this, the dialogue assists in creating belief clarity.
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